The explosive growth of digital communications media has supplemented conventional forms of communication. One example of digital communications is instant messaging (IM). As known to those having skill in the art, the IM environment is defined in RFC 2778 and RFC 2779, which was published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in February of 2000. Briefly, the IM environment provides a medium in which digital communications occurs on a near real-time basis between a sender and a recipient, thereby permitting a sender to send and receive “instant” messages to and from a recipient.
While the near real-time communication of IM is appealing, IM nonetheless has several drawbacks. For example, unlike face-to-face conversations, when the recipient steps away from the recipient's workstation for a moment, the sender may send messages to the recipient without any knowledge that the recipient is no longer at the workstation. In order to remedy this deficiency, others have manipulated presence mechanisms of IM to display presence-status indications (also referred to simply as “status indications”) that are indicative of the recipient's absence. For example, these status indications may include messages that indicate that the recipient is “away,” “busy,” “unavailable,” etc.
As is known in the art, the status indications may be manually set by the recipient prior to the recipient's absence from the workstation. Alternatively, the status indications may be programmed to activate after a predefined time interval when there is no activity at the recipient's workstation and programmed to deactivate when the recipient begins typing again. Unfortunately, the status indications provide only a limited remedy to the aforementioned drawbacks. For this reason, a need exists in the industry for improved IM systems that provide supplemental remedies to the aforementioned drawbacks.